I think this page sumarizes a lot of what I like about Commander

I remember once I was doing a science fair project and part of it involved swabbing an earthworm to see what kind of bacteria were on it. I don’t do well with any kind of worm, especially as a kid, so I didn’t want to. My mom (who is even worse with worms than I am) said that she’d hold the worm for me if I agreed to do it, to be my moral support. That was enough to get me to swab the worm and finish the project and win first prize at the science fair.

Snake meat is surprisingly delicate when cooked, too much sauce and you may as well just have pulled chicken. The two best ways I know of to cook snake are skinned and gutted whole grilled with a dry rub, or gutted marinated and baked skin-on. Be wary of the bones when you do it skin-on though, they’re small and sharp.

My exact words… even today I don’t have any fear of most critters, unless they are dangerous or can hurt you.

On family meetings (usually in farms, I have many relatives), I’m called to remove critters (sometimes need to kill, like the nasty wandering spider). Once saved a frog from getting roasted alive, after it was found inside a working oven.

Commander’s face looks like my mom’s when she faced a cicada.. She hated/feared it more than flying roaches. ^_^

The frog one sounds like a wasted opportunity to me. Let it roast. Serve frog’s legs. I tried them once. They didn’t taste like chicken to me. It was more like the taste of fish (like mackerel or something) and the texture of a chicken wing.

I love seeing a character like the Commander made so uncomfortable about something so small. He is huge man, clearly seen (and took part in no doubt) more than his share of violence, been in a military of some kind, but when it comes to a harmless little arthropod he crawling out of his skin. To be completely honest, I am the same way when it come to needles.

On a different note, is the gap in June’s teeth from a missing tooth or from unusually large diastema?

Seemingly a long time before that. He is missing it when you showed a younger him with his friends taking a picture of them walking calmly away form an explosion. Not sure how much younger he is there, but he looks younger there than he did on the millepede planet.

On a semi-related note, how far in the future is he from? Not looking for an exact year or anything, just a rough idea. Like 50 or 500 or way more?

Each comment gets moderated, perhaps the program/Coela/an admin thought you were being spammy/rude/somethin’ in your first response. I think the giant centipede comment was referring to Scolipede, rather than June’s pet, but I could be wrong.

Millipedes actually just crawl around eating whatever they decide looks tasty. Centipedes are dicks that eat whatever they think they can kill with ALL OF THE POISON EVER.

And to think people think spiders are the real enemy. Spiders eat all the bad stuff you don’t like and (mostly) do everything they can to stay out of your way. Snakes too. Centipedes? Thing could be less than an inch long and it’ll still go for you.

You speak so much truth it’s not even funny. Back during my college years I was pulling an all-nighter and… losing. There was a centipede all the way on the other side of the room and I kept nodding out for minutes at a time. Every time I’d open my eyes, the centipede would have positioned itself somewhere closer to me in the room. Then I had one especially long snooze. When I woke up, I couldn’t see it at all… until I checked the wall behind me and found the damned thing reaching for the back of my neck. It died in less than three seconds and my personal war against the fuckers began that day. I like to think that one I killed was an important political/military figure in the centipede community, especially since recently one tried to drop on me in my room. I’m not sure what got it first–the ceiling fan or my rampaging feet as I did my best impersonation of a frantic schoolgirl trying to find out what just landed on me.

haha! Ohhhh yes. I hate all bugs. I literally bug bomb my house once a year and then spray down a nice coating of bug barrier. Works great! Every now and again a sneak little bugger will get in and it dies horribly.

When CB admitted to hating millipedes I thought I shared that with him. But looking in more details, I don’t. It’s centipedes that I hate. Millipedes are alright. They’re even kinda cute, in a creepy-crawly way. Centipedes need to die.

It’s easy to distinguish the two, centipedes have legs that go to the sides and long antennas while millipedes have legs that stay below their body and short antennas. (There are also more scientific differences, like how millipedes have two pairs of legs on most of their body sections, while centipedes have only one single pair of legs per section.)

Anyway, the bottom line is, centipedes are awful. I suppose CB will never go to Centipede Planet, because the only thing to do on such a planet is dropping all the nukes ever until the entire crust is turned into roiling magma.

The bug looks like it has a very mad expression in panel three. I don’t blame anyone for recoiling from something that angry. Specially if experience already dictates it’s gonna try to get under your clothes.

Good thing I’m not in the Commander’s shoes…’it’s my kid’s pet’ would have registered in my brain a half second after ‘BUG ON ME’, which would be plenty of time for my hand to have splattered the thing.

This comic is really awesome- especially coupled with your story. It might be funny, but it reminds us that we tend to forget the ridiculously gross, stupid, repeatedly ignorant things we put our own parents through.

Loved his expression in the last panel- “Why am I always right about these things.”

the chemical knocks out spiders but doesn’t kill them, they just stand around in plain sight wobbling slightly for a few hours while hungry aracnivores wake up for the day. The Millipede Planet has a complex ecology.

I wonder if maybe they stop doing it if they get handled enough to get used to it? Not sure a bug can really ‘get used to’ something they way a smarter animal can, but I am reminded of my gerbils who at first would poop every time we picked them up, but eventually stopped.

@Coelasquid I had a similar experience last fall with my little sister Lilly, on the day my mom was taking me back to college. She was really sick with a nasty cough and sore throat, but was refusing to take her cough syrup, even though she knew it would make her feel better. I sat down next to her on the couch and told her about how much I hate yogurt. I mean, every time I’ve ever tried to eat it, I’ve gagged to hard to even keep trying. I told her that if I could eat a spoonful of yogurt, I bet she could take a spoonful of her medicine, and she reluctantly agreed. Mom had us both stand over the sink with our spoons full of gunk, and on her mark, Lilly and I stuck the spoons in our mouths. As soon as I had the yogurt inside, I basically froze- for a few seconds, my gag reflex warred with my determination to show my little sister how awesome I was. The gag reflex won, but at least I didn’t throw up- just sorta involuntarily spat it out. I genuinely lost control of my muscles for a moment.

At any rate, Lilly’s mood improved a lot that day- she still laughs about the face I made while trying to swallow- and I eventually got the taste and texture out of my mouth. I am never doing that again.

Oh man, this brings back memories. When I was younger I wanted a tarantula so bad, and I finally begged my parents into letting me get two as part of a science project. Mom and Dad did not like those things, but Dad still helped me set up the terrarium (terraria? There were two of them) and get the crickets for them to eat. Mom helped by agreeing not to squash them, which considering how much my mom hates tarantulas is kind of a miracle.

Hey Coelasquid, have you ever played one of the Yakuza games (for PS2 and PS3)? I always kinda expected to see the protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu, show up in your comic mostly because he and the Commander have a lot in common. Kazuma is a very nice guy, incredibly badass, and a single father.

I grew up around millipede swarms, and to this day I cannot STAND the smell of millipedes. If you’ve ever taken guaifenesin for congestion or a respiratory infection, you may have noticed that you start to smell funky after a day or three. That, friends and neighbors, is very much what millipedes smell like. Also, the pills smell like millipedes, and they taste like the smell of millipedes.

Thinking about it, I kind of envy Commander Badass the financial, emotional, masculine, and physical security it takes to be able to casually arsonate a personal property – even one as reasonably replaceable as an old flannel shirt – when it has come into contact with something which can be reasonably determined to be irredeemably contaminated with the skeevies and ickies, or which otherwise needs to be disposed of.

I had an awesome mum. We’d bring her mice, shrews, frogs, toads, bugs and crawlies of all description, and she’d admire them politely and even interestedly before telling us to put it back where we found it.
Here’s to you, Mum*.
*No, she isn’t dead, but she deserves the praise regardless.

This kinda makes me want one of those now. Weird, huh? Funny how the bigger the bug, the less I mind it. Seriously, it looks fun to have one of those crawling on your arm. That kind of bug is fascinating. Great job in capturing its creepy-crawly motion.